Persistent Catalog

[egabrum]

v2.3: When Keypirinha opens at start-up, completely rebuilds the catalog, ignoring the previous one.

My current catalog has about 6000 items. Currently, it takes about 3 minutes to rebuild the catalog. Applications and bookmarks are added quickly, but the rest is only available after those ~3 minutes.

This means that, for the first 3 minutes (the minutes that users normally use to open working documents), the vast majority of my catalog is not available and I have to open those files using other means, which beats the purpose of the launcher.

[polyvertex]

Do you need to have 6000 items in your Catalog?
EDIT: Also, if I take your other comments into account, should I assume that most of these items come from distant file system(s)?

[egabrum]

Let me explain my use case:
I very rarely browse/explore for files anymore. Not always, but in most scenarios I feel it's an outdated method to fetch and open files and folders.
I work with multiple shared (with many people) folders in different network drives. People store files in whatever structure they feel like, which depends on the person and even the mood of the same person in different days. Even I don't remember where I store some of my files. And I couldn't care less:

I have Launchy (progressively switching to KP, of course) cataloguing a wide range of folders with deep sub-folders. When I need something, I just query it. I don't need to bother to remember where it is or to create a link that breaks every time somebody moves or slightly renames a path. I often see people confusedly browsing for a file like an old lady looking for a candy at the bottom of her purse, while I open that file or folder in 2 seconds.

I use KP or Launchy instead of something like Everything because of the scoring system and other additional features, and because they allow me to limit the range of search. Everything is awesome, but for other purposes.

For example, in my current Launchy catalog, I have almost 35,000 items. Of course I only use a tiny fraction of them, but when I need something, it's there. Google indexes billions of pages. I'll only use a few hundred of them in my lifetime, but the beauty of Google is the range of search and the ease of access.

Of course, indexing 6,000 files takes some time. My issue is with not having the catalog available when I start the application.

#24 would help to alleviate things too.

I have spent time looking into the code, but it's well beyond my skill level. I don't want you to think that my attitude is: "Here, do this for me. For free". It's the prerogative of the developers to decide on the feature set.

[polyvertex]

Make sense. Well, considering Keypirinha's current design, implementing a persistent Catalog should not take too long... Granted for a future release!

[szaiser]

I totally support this issue, my situation is exactly the same as that of @egabrum. Additionally, I have some kind of feature request, for which I also have to explain my usecase: I sync the portable installation of Launchy (and soon Keypirinha) across multiple computers via Dropbox. Of course, the catalogue (which is persistent in Launchy and soon will be persistent in Keypirinha) is different for every computer, as the files on it are not the same.

Would it be possible, to freely configure the location of the Keypirinha catalogue in the configuration file? This way, the configuration in the Keypirinha folder is synced and is identical on each computer, while the catalogue is not.

[polyvertex]

The persistent catalog will be machine-specific, which means a catalog file will be created for each machine somewhere under the portable/Local directory.

In other words, your request will be implicitly supported and all you'll have to do is to push-sync the whole portable directory to your DropBox (or the whole keypirinha install directory if you wish so), without having to filter out anything.

[szaiser]

@polyvertex That sounds great!